Tuesday, May 1, 2012

Beyond pleasure and pain

I
think I have discovered an interesting constant (k) in literature.

A
circle of thought lies unbroken across the millennia and the cultures, roughly
from Leucippus and Democritus through Nietzsche and beyond. Reformulating the
world anew at its periphery, arguments go back and forth. Yet, the centrality
of the thought remains fixed. This is the materialistic conception of the
cosmos: The world is made of matter, and there is nothing else besides matter.

The
conception is complex. Nothing is firm in it. The arc of this thought, at times
concave and at times convex, changes in details from writer to writer. The
constant is that it starts from materialism and ends with extolling the
principle of pleasure.

This vortex of words seems to enjoy a steady, and lately
increasing, readership. Who can resist the allure of pleasure? Who can resist
the allure of pleasure, especially when it is accompanied by the implicit or
explicit promise that any such system of thought has the power to destroy the
scourge of pain from the earth?

It
is extraordinary how many authors in this series of writers leave you with the
impression they have discovered the world anew—and rarely do they acknowledge
the debts they owe to each other. I do not know for sure, because I have not
been more than a superficial student of their systems of thought, but the lack
of acknowledgment of the debts to each other seems to me symptomatic either of
pride or ignorance, or both pride and ignorance.

Pride
and ignorance are two vices. So you will immediately know why it has lately
occurred to me that I might be able to accomplish what seems to be an
impossible dream. Might we take the discussion beyond the confines of pleasure
and pain?

Make
no mistake. The “principle” of pleasure and pain seems to be so self-evident as
to have gradually come to dominate the culture of our world.

This
principle has even made God good! What does this mean? It means that God is
acknowledged only when he gives us pleasure.

And
when he does not give us pleasure? Off with his head; the mechanism of the
guillotine is always available to the self-seekers of power. God is dead.

“Charles
Darwin travelled to the Galapagos aboard the HMS Beagle, and the divergence of
species that he observed in the isolated islands helped set him on the path to
the theory of evolution. He was still a religious man then, but, over the
years, as he worked out his theory, there was less room for God in his cosmos,
and finally none at all. He said later in life:

I cannot
persuade myself that a beneficent and omnipotent God would have designedly
created the Ichneumonidae [digger wasps] with the express intention of their
feeding within the living bodies of caterpillars...

(Quoted in Dawkins, The
Selfish Gene, 2d ed., p. 284.)”

The
reason why many of us deny the existence of God is our inability to believe
that God could create such a thing as pain.

I
have a simple announcement to make: We need to get over it. We would not know
pleasure, if we did not know pain.

And
then we would be zombies.

These
are the alternatives: either human beings or zombies.

The
alternatives are that stark. In order to get a better grip on how we can rid
ourselves of this poison, we have to dig deeper into history, philosophy, and
common sense of the principle of pleasure.

The
existence of pleasure and pain was elevated to the status of “principle” by
Jeremy Bentham. We know what a principle is. A principle is something
universal: true in itself everywhere and every time.

And
there we have the first hurdle. We have to swallow a first inner contradiction
of this conception: Pleasure is not a term uniquely understood in itself
everywhere and every time. In order to define pleasure we have to define pain.

Just because it is not a true principle, axiomatic and
valid at first sight, the statement has imperialistic tendencies. The attempt
to establish this proposition as a universal entity creates havoc. It destroys
everything it comes across.

The
first assumed obstacle that perishes is religion. With Nietzsche God is dead.

Comes
Freud: Love is dead. Long live sex!

This
is our culture today.

Only
one problem. A huge one. Our culture is not producing happiness.

Our
culture is producing only opportunities to spend money to purchase happiness.

We
have a sexual dysfunction? God forbid! We must get rid of it! But how? We must
visit a psychiatrist.

Oh,
wait. Now that we have discovered the many moral and intellectual fallacies of
psychiatry, we go a step farther. We go directly to the source of pleasure: we
buy a chemical pill. We buy Cialis.

I
can not stop being astonished at the list of symptoms to be aware of when using
Cialis. This advertisement reaches all of us throughout the evening news.

I
guess if I were to use Cialis I would have a heart attack just listening to
that ad.

Benjamin
Franklin, one of my heroes, knew the perpetual story well: a fool and his money
are soon parted.

Along
with money here come the most insistent peddlers of pleasure; the
merchandisers. Just like motorcycles, they are everywhere!

Stop.
How do we get rid of this nefarious infestation of our culture by the principle
of pleasure?

It
really does not take much of an effort to realize the fundamental weakness that
stands at the root of this conception of life. The bottom-line belief is that
life is made of material atoms—and nothing else. Inadvertently, materialists
have carried over from the inception of this conception a subtle inner
contradiction that explodes in the end into a leap offaith. They attribute to matter
the ability tofeelpleasure or pain.

A
simple query, by the way.Who is
sure that caterpillars do not enjoy being eaten by digger wasps?

In
the end, materialists do not look for explanations. They generally look for a
cure to soothe their existential pains.

This
is the prescription I offer without claiming originality or asking for
financial compensation: Practice the virtues.

Practice
any virtue “remorselessly” and you will, first, encounter all other virtues
along the way; along this WAY you will also overcome many causes of pain.

And
you will reach your nirvana.

Mr.
Gorga would like to acknowledge the invaluable editorial assistance received
from Peter J. Bearse and David S. Wise.

Carmine Gorga, a former
Fulbright Scholar, is president of The Somist Institute, a research
organization in Gloucester, Mass.ThroughThe Economic Process, To My Polis,and numerous other publications in
economic theory and policy, he has transformed economics from a linear to a
relational discipline. Dr. Gorga blogs at http://me-a-new-economic-atlas-and-you/